Tammy Faye Messner

Tammy Faye Messner (7 March 1942-20 July 2007) was an American televangelist and the wife of Jim Bakker from 1961 to 1992. She co-hosted The PTL Club with him from 1974 to 1989, and the show ended when her husband was convicted and imprisoned for fraud, which also led to Faye divorcing him.

Biography
Tammy Faye LaValley was born in International Falls, Minnesota in 1942 to a family of Pentecostal preachers, and she met Jim Bakker in 1960 while studying at an Assemblies of God bible college. The family travelled around the United States and evangelized, and they co-hosted a CBN puppet ministry show from 1964 to 1973 and then The PTL Club ministry and television program from 1974 to 1989. Tammy Bakker was known for her acceptance of the LGBT community, and she reached out to HIV/AIDS patients at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s. In 1989, Jim Bakker was convicted of fraud for embezzling PTL funds for the Heritage USA theme park, and he was also accused of raping the church secretary Jessica Hahn. Faye divorced her husband during his five-year stay in prison, and she fell ill with colon cancer in 1996 and died in 2007.